05/19/2017

Earlier this week, I had an email on Tyler Cowen's post on the question of why Chinese civilization has been so successful in establishing a centralized hegemony over a population around the same size featured on Marginal Revolution. In that post, Rome vs. China, I look at how geographic factors, lacking in China, contributed to the unraveling of the Roman Empire:

On the comparison of China and Rome, one of the factors that immediately came to my mind was a combination of (2) and (4): The Roman Empire faced a much more complex logistical problem of maintaining territorial integrity than did China and its territorial integrity could be destroyed from a sea campaign.

These two themes actually did greatly contribute to Rome’s unraveling during the Crisis of the 5th Century: One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Crisis of the 5th Century that led to the Fall of the Roman Empire was the loss of North Africa to the Vandals. Peter Heather provides a short description of how destructive the loss of North Africa was to the empire in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006):

“No other single blow could have done the Empire so much harm. At a stroke. Geiseric had removed from Aetius’ control the richest provinces of the Roman west, with the result that financial crisis looked How was it allowed to happen? Presumably, after four and a half years of relative peace, and thinking that Geiseric was going to keep the treaty made in February 435, people took their eyes off the ball. There was, I suspect, simply too much instability in other parts of the empire for troops to be left in Carthage on a ‘what if?’ basis. The Visigothic war in particular, brought to an end just before Geiseric made his move, had probably demanded every available man. So with the Carthage garrison at minimum strength, the cunning Vandal had taken full advantage.” (p. 289)

Here, I see the theme of (4) in your blog post: “[China] has a large space of relatively flat plains.” Chinese generals did not face the same complex logistical problems that Roman ones did in deploying their military force across their nation.

When North Africa was lost, retaking it to reassert territorial integrity was not as easy as simply marching a couple of legions there. If it were that easy, I very much doubt the Vandals could have held onto North Africa. Instead, the Roman Empire needed to launch a sea campaign, which is theme (2) of your post: “when it comes to naval warfare — more common for Europe — small countries have a chance to punch above their weight, witness England and Portugal.”

In 468 both the Western and Eastern Empires launched a massive joint campaign to take back North Africa. However, the armada they had launched was smashed at the Battle of Cape Bon by a much smaller Vandal fleet that had the weather gauge to its advantage. Punching above their weight, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa was able to beat back a campaign manned and funded by both Ravenna and Constantinople—a feat that would have been close to impossible on land.

The failure of that armada to land on North Africa doomed half of the Roman world to extinction, for without the North African provinces, the Western Roman Empire could not reassert its hegemony over the centrifugal forces now at full force across Gaul and Hispania. The difficulties of maintaining optimal deployments of troops in an empire largely bifurcated (at least in scale of importance) by a sea and the hazards of warfare at sea conspired to make the problem of maintaining imperial territorial integrity too difficult for Roman politics to solve during the Crisis of the 5th Century, contributing to the total collapse of that integrity in the west. Had the Western Roman Empire not been encumbered by (2) and (4) the survival of said integrity is certainly imaginable—and within the capability its resources offered it.

04/07/2017

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

-Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress on April 2nd

Yesterday, April 6th, marked the centenary of the American intervention in the First World War. After three years of armed neutrality, the United States entered that conflict and thereby rejuvenated the Entente’s strength, which had been drained after three years of great bloodshed. Within a year of American troops arriving on the continent, the Entente had achieved a decisive victory against Germany and the other Central Powers.

Although the United States ostensibly declared war due to Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare that January, the purpose of American intervention took on a rational constructivist intent even before war was declared. When he had addressed a special joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war on April 2nd, Woodrow Wilson announced that the intent of American policy would be “to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles.”

As emphasized by the fourteen points that Wilson promulgated in January 1918, American aims in the war were not restricted to guaranteeing the safety of the nation and of American shipping. Instead, those aims were to rationally construct a new era of international relations, much as the Treaty of Westphalia had done. In this new order, self-determination was to be the ruling principle of this international order and a new League of Nations was to be the means of arbitrating international disputes. No longer would national borders be drawn by a clique of aristocrats, but instead by the general wills of distinct nationalities. No longer would nations need to go to war to achieve their ends, but they would have recourse to international arbitration. Rather than arms-races and autocracies, there would be peace and democracy.

However, benevolent his ambitions for rationally constructing a new international system out of the First World War’s debris may have been, Wilson’s efforts were never met with success and would actually do quite a bit of harm. By intervening in the war, the United States could grant the Entente powers a decisive victory, but it could not prevent them from demanding a Carthaginian peace from Germany that the would not be capable of enforcing. Moreover, the American war-effort brought with it a form of the closed society that willingly treaded on liberty in order to organize all of society towards the single end of fighting the war. Alas, Wilson should have known better because the American Founding Fathers had recognized how dangerous a policy of meddling into European affairs as and had admonished posterity to never do so.

There was no more forceful expression of those principles in foreign policy than in George Washington’s “Farewell Address.” In that letter, which served as a collection of the classically republican principles motivating the foundation of the American notion, Washington had advised against just the course of action that Wilson led America into: “Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?” John Adams, perhaps the most underrated of all the Founders, himself emphasized those principles. In an 1825 letter to Thomas Jefferson, he expressed his resentment of European political order and why America should have no part in it: “The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of.” Jefferson himself had expressed similar sentiments about the dangers of European entanglements in a 1815 letter to Thomas Leiper: “It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep our markets open for what we can spare or want; and the less we have to do with the amities or enmities of Europe, the better.”

While we had France for an enemy, Germany was the scene to employ and baffle her arms.

-William Pitt, 1762 Speech in the House of Commons

Of course, around a century had passed since the Founders provided that advance and American intervention in the First World War. So, it is possible to argue that the American Founding principles were entirely unsuited to the First World War. After all, one might be inclined to think that, as the war’s name does imply, the First World War was the first war at a global scale. Being so, it is reasonable enough, at least prima facie, that the United States could not be neutral because the war had global implications that the American people would eventually have an interest in.

However, this argument neglects the fact that the First World War was not the first global war nor the American Founders have inexperienced with the challenges posed by global war waged by European belligerents. Instead, the American Founders lived in an era in which the American colonies and early republic were encompassed all about by the global wars of European belligerents, particularly the Seven-Years’ War and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Although the First World War may have gone into history as the first ‘world war,’ it was really not the first such war. Instead, the Seven-Years’ War (1756-63) is most properly the first of a long line of wars on a global scale. If anything, the Seven-Years’ War was more properly a world war than the First World War, as William Pitt had purposefully used the opportunity to secure extensive colonial gains in North America and India that would guarantee Great Britain a colonial empire for generations to follow.

Similarly to the Seven-Years’ war, most of the First World War’s bloodshed was in Europe and its hostilities were to be entirely decided in battles on the European continent, unlike, for example, the Second World War’s Pacific theater. In this sense, the First World War was much like the Seven Years’ War (1756-63): There may have been theaters of war across the world, yet those theaters were largely European violence spilling over into the rest of the world. Just as the French and British fought in North America in the Seven Years’ War (a theater known to American schoolchildren as the French and Indian War), so did the Germans and British fight around the African Rift Valley.

All the world-wide maneuvering in the First World War was largely an attempt by one power or another to tie down resources of its enemies that could otherwise be allocated to Europe. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla campaign required the British army to station battalions that could have otherwise buttressed the Western front just as Maximilian von Spee’s mischief in the South Pacific required the Royal Navy to dispatch two battlecruisers there, including HMS Invincible, that would have otherwise been stationed in Britain. Although, the First World War was a global war in scope, it was still fundamentally a European war similar to the war that America’s Founders had experienced in Seven Years’ War’s North-American theater.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were another set of European conflicts that spilled out into the wider world and which the Founders actually had to create concrete policies in response to. When the Revolutionary Wars broke out in 1792, George Washington wisely kept America neutral, whatever may have been people’s sentiments over the political principles entangled with that war. For example, when the French ambassador Citizen Genêt beat the drums of war for the revolutionary government on American soil, Washington asked for the French to recall him, which they did. His administration also negotiated the Jay Treaty, which diffused tensions with Great Britain that might have led to another war.

John Adams showed similar restraint in dealing with the scandal of the XYZ affair and in navigating American diplomacy through the Quasi-War without having to get involved in the wider war between Britain and France. Adams certainly did trample on American liberty by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, but a sympathetic historian could very well give the president some credit for trying to keep America out of war by signing them. Grievous mistakes like the Alien and Sedition Acts notwithstanding, the American Founders provided an example of how the American republic should interact with European wars, and that is with disinterested benevolence towards all.

During the First World War, America should have observed to the wise principles of the American founding and avoided committing the nation to a European war. By 1917, the First World War had devolved into a nationalistic struggle for existence that a nation founded on America’s principles should have had any role in. When Pope Benedict XV had asked for the belligerents to enumerate their war-aims, none could actually do so, because they really had no specific war-aims. For all belligerents, the only option worse than continuing the war was losing it. If the Entente won, Germany expected to be humiliated and dismembered. If the Central Powers won, France and Great Britain expected Germany to establish an autocratic hegemony over central Europe and thus control over the wider continent. The war was therefore a death-spiral, in which nations had no conscious policy but to commit themselves to the struggle.

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.

-Ferdinand Foch

Wilson led the United States into the conflict with the view that America could provide a conciliatory solution to the conflict and mitigate other powers’ more unsavory interests. However, just as Washington’s principle of honesty being the best policy made American entirely unsuited to politics of late 18th century Europe, so should have it prevented the nation entirely unsuited to those of early 20th century Europe. Wilson had proclaimed “open covenants of peace” as the first of his Fourteen Points, but he should have known that Europe diplomats would have none of that. Britain, France, and Italy had signed secret treaties, including the London Pact and the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement,that had motivated the fighting. Self-interested as they were, British, French, and Italian diplomats and politicians were not going to happily, or even willingly, agree to having the spoils of the bloodiest war their respective nations have ever fought be denied to them.

The tragedy of the Treaty of Versailles, which ultimately failed to provide any lasting resolution to the First World War’s carnage, was that it was simultaneously too harsh and too lenient. For whatever Wilson may have intended to happen at the Paris Peace Conference, the United States was still but a single nation at the table. Primus inter pares, yes, but still but a single nation. The United States could decisively turn the fortunes of war in the Entente’s favor, but it could not prevent the Entente powers from demanding the kind of victory that the kind of treaty that such a victory would normally prescribe. The Treaty of Versailles was therefore too harsh of a treaty. Moreover, as that decisive victory came from an overseas source, when it came time for the European Entente powers to enforce the treaty they had inflicted upon Germany, they could not. Although Wilson would have liked to have America play a larger role across the world, the American public did not yet have an appetite for such a victory.

The Paris Peace conference was indeed a circus and it was a circus because the United States really had no place at the table. The reasons why the war had been so long and so bloody was that its motivations, to quote John Adams, were “deeply tainted with prejudices.” The problems and predicaments posed by the war had solutions and outcomes that could probably only be decided by Europeans and for Europeans. American involvement only pushed those solutions and outcomes back a generation, and unfortunately they would involve two foreign powers, America and the Soviet Union, establishing two competing empires over the continent.

Although it is possible to explain the harm done by Wilson’s foreign policy as a consequence of starry-eyed idealism, Wilson’s domestic policy during the war demonstrated a robust authoritarianism entirely contradictory to America’s Founding principles. The United States was going to go to war one and indivisible. Those who dissented would be singled out and dealt with. As Wilson warned in his April 2nd speech: “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” And repression there was. The 1917 Espionage Act provided the federal government the ability to jail and punish those who interfered with recruitment or prevented enthusiasm for the war. Eugene Debs, who had previously been a Socialist candidate for president, was arrested and convicted for having “obstructed recruitment.” This systematic use of repression to control dissent was a radical departure from the polycentric mode of governance that Alexis de Tocqueville had lauded in Democracy in America. It was a rejection of the Founding ideals of a nation, rooted in dissenting Protestantism, that had formulated those ideals, in part, through protracted debates in pamphlets and other printed means.

Just as in medicine, the best maxim in politics is to first do no harm. The abandonment of Founding principles in foreign policy did much harm. At its best, Wilson’s enthusiasm for war was a naïve attempt to make the world better, at its worse, that enthusiasm was a prideful attempt to impose a political system on the wider world through central planning. Either way, Wilson’s intervention did very little good and a whole lot of harm. The Treaty of Versailles did not secure Wilson’s aim of “really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles” against “selfish and autocratic power.” Rather than making the world safe for democracy, Wilson’s attempt to rationally construct a new world order made it a petri dish for various mutations of the closed society, whether it be Bolshevism in Russia or Nazism in Germany. Rather than securing liberty at home, the American war-effort trampled on American liberty; the 1917 Espionage Act is still one of its reverberating effects.

When look at from a distinctly historical point of view, the American intervention in the First World War was a blunder that, like much else in the Progressive Era, corroded the Founding ideas of the American republic. It would have been better to take George Washington's words to heart and to avoid "interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe." The First World War was a European war that could have only reached a suitable resolution with a distinctly European solution.

04/08/2016

That war, as well as history, is not black and white could never be as starkly demonstrated as when veterans of the Wehrmacht continue to defend their service on the Eastern Front decades after their defeat and after it became clear just how immense the Third Reich's atrocities really were. And yet those veterans still go on defending what they did.

Their enemy? Bolschewismus. Not even the Russians, but Bolschewismus. Still after all these years, they still believe that they helped save Europe from the Red Tide. "If we hadn't stopped it, it would have reached your country and France too."

One at least has to applaud their sense of agency when compared to Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter's depiction of the German people as just another victim of the National Socialist régime. While their defense of the Wehrmacht's certainly should make people looking in uncomfortable, I'm not entirely certain that an impartial spectator would censure them directly. For one thing, it does very little good to pick at an old man's narrative of their lives. Everyone has their delusions and those delusions can allow people to cope with traumatic events. Their narratives will die off along with the people harmed by those events. Furthermore, as the fate of East Germany attests to, the Red Army arrived in East Prussia, Potsdam, Silesia and elsewhere as conquerors whose leaders saw no place for an independent Germany ever again.

The teenage conscript was defending his East Prussian home in 1945. Alas, he was defending his home against a threat that was largely brought upon him by his government. With a stroke of a pen, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact handed all of Easter Europe into the hands of Comrade Stalin. If war was really inevitable between the west and the east, it was the Nazi's own blunderous foreign policy that made it inevitable. The uncomfortable fact is that matters of grand strategy probably mean very little to whether it's praiseworthy for a particular person to defend a particular plot of land against particular invaders.That being said, in 1944, I think it was in everyone's best interest for the Germans to simply surrender unconditionally. Defending one's own particular interests conflicts with such a surrender.

In his hagiographic memoir, Lost Victories, Erich von Manstein, for whom matters of grand strategy certainly reflect on the praiseworthiness of his actions, himself paints Bolshevism as the ultimate foe of his struggle. Moreover, the field marshal goes as far as to assert that Bolshevism should have been everybody's enemy:

There was that admirable tenacity of the British which impels them to go through with any struggle they have once embarked on, however threatening the situation of the moment may be. On top of this, in the bitterness of their 'unconditional' hatred for Hitler and his régime (and for 'Prussianism', too, in the case of several political leaders), came the inability to discern an even worse system, and an even greater menace to Europe, in the form of the Soviet Union... British eyes were blind to the fact that the big need in a changed world would be to create a world balance of power in view of the might which the Soviet Union had attained and the dangers inherent in its dedication to the idea of world revolution. (von Manstein 1982: 155-156)

Perhaps the greatest irony is that von Manstein's vision eventually came to be realized. While it took régime change, West Germany serve as one of the significant players in NATO. Heinz Guderian, despite his vocal loyalty to NSDAP during the war, would play a significant role in the reestablishment of the Bundeswehr. NATO would also gladly use the expertise of Hitler's generals in its own standoff against the Red Army.

05/08/2015

One of the great questions that VE Day! One of the questions that VE Day brings to mind is the question of how the Third Reich managed to last as long as it day. Any hope of victory, or even stalemate, on the Eastern Front was smashed on July 116h, 1943 when Operation Citadel was called off. Ever since then the Ostheer was in constant retreat. With the success of the Allied landings in Normandy, the Wehrmacht then had to fight a two-front war. With the exception of the Battle of the Bulge, even the Western Front was fought consistently on the back front.

The question of the German willingness to fight on in hopeless circumstances, and the institutional circumstances that made such a fight possible, is the subject of Ian Kershaw's book, The End. Here's a short excerpt of a book more than worthwhile to be read in full:

Since we know the end of the story, it is hard not to ask why contemporaries did not see as obviously as we do in retrospective: that the war was plainly lost, at the absolute latest by the time the western Allies had consolidated their landings in France and the Red Army had advanced deep into Poland in the summer of 1944. But, until surprisingly late, that was not how they did see it. Certainly, they knew that the great vistas of 1941-2 could not be realized. But the German leadership, not just Hitler, thought there was still something to be gained from the war. Strength of will and radical mobilization, they thought, could prolong the conflict until new 'miracle weapons' came along. The war effort would be sustained so far that the Allies would look for a negotiated way out of mounting losses as advances were blocked and reversed. A split between east and west would materialize, and Germany would still be able to hold on to some territorial gains and, eventually with western aid, turn against the common enemy of Soviet Communism. Such hopes and illusions, if harboured by a rapidly dwindling number of Germans (especially once the Red Army reached the Oder in late January 1945), lingered almost to the end. So even in the final, terrible phase of death and devastation, faced with insuperable odds, the fight went on amid a mounting series of regional collapses, driven by increasingly irrational but self-sustaining destructive energy. (Kershaw 2011: 15)

04/23/2015

To the radical egalitarian, the civilization that we live in is horribly unjust. The power laws that manifest themselves in the distribution of wealth lead to the very few owning the vast majority. Worse than that inequality of ownership is the inequality of opportunity that accompanies it, with the vast majority chained to menial labor lest they fall into grinding poverty. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented in The Social Contract: “Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.” A powerful, stirring accusation no doubt, and one that cuts to the heart of the radical egalitarian uneasiness with, really, all political order.

In the book that followed, Rousseau argued that the only way for human beings to live freely, or even as proper human beings since man was free by definition for Rousseau, was for each person to freely give themselves to the general will: “each, by giving himself to all, gives himself to no one, and since there is no associate over whom one does not acquire the same right as one grants over oneself, one gains the equivalent of all one loses, and more force to preserve what one has” (Rousseau 1997: 50). Rousseau’s condemnation of the hierarchies of 18th century Europe helped to motivate a trend of political thinking that fought against such institutions in the centuries to follow, beyond the feudal ancien régime to the liberal commercial society.

One of the essential features of the radical egalitarian outlook that Rousseau helped to promote is that each person in a society should relate and sympathize with the fellow members of her society as an equal. In such a society, everybody is united with each other in cooperation encompassing the entire community. Rousseau wrote of such a society in The Social Contract, “As soon as this multitude is united in one body, one cannot injure on of the members without attacking the body, and still less can one injure the body without the members being affected” (Ibid: 52). The egalitarian society is, therefore, one in which everybody within it pulls together for the common good.

Only through that act of encompassing cooperation could people interact with each other as equals. Much like hoplites in formation, their total dedication to the community ensured that no one person could stake out a position above his fellow citizens. However, once people began to look after their own interests, the solidarity of primordial society decayed, which Rousseau recognizes in his Second Discourse: “This is how natural inequality imperceptibly unfolds together with unequal associations, and the differences between men, developed by their different circumstances, become more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and begin to exercise a corresponding influence on the fate of individuals” (Rousseau 1997: 170).

It’s a tempting vision that appeals to the innate human yearning for encompassing cooperation and meaning through such cooperation. But it’s one that’s irreconcilable with the hierarchical nature of a complex society. The reason is that egalitarianism stems from our innate yearning for an egalitarian society that was selected for over the hundreds of thousands of years that our distant ancestors once lived in.

Radical egalitarianism has become apart of social democracy’s civil religion. To speak against it is an act of heresy, yet radical egalitarianism is a very dangerous doctrine that stands juxtaposed to the demands of the civilization whose fruits we enjoy. When a radical egalitarian sees a world in chains, a more sober perspective recognizes the necessary hierarchy to sustain that has sustained civilization across the millennia. Put into practice, in its indiscriminate leveling of hierarchy, radical egalitarianism seeks to destroy the social complexity that has made social existence possible in complex societies.

It isn’t an accident that radical egalitarianism is an advocate for a type of society resembling the ancestral bands that Homo sapiens evolved within. At its heart, radical egalitarianism is an expression of humanity’s yearning for such a society. Human beings aren’t simply souls in machines; rather, they are animals whose social aptitudes have evolved over a vast natural history that should be the subject of greater appreciation in the study of human society. To understand man as a political animal, one has to understand man as a band animal; in the words of Daniel Klein, one has to understand band-man and his legacy around us. Apart of the legacy of the band is a desire for an egalitarian community and cooperation that encompasses across that entire community.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of Jared Diamond’s general argument is that civilization put to an end the egalitarian status that people had once enjoyed in their ancestors’ bands. The sympathy that motivates people’s desire for a fair society and the moral sentiments that lead us to approve of the leveling of hierarchy evolved in the unique context of the ancestral bands our Paleolithic ancestors resided in. In those bands, people generally relate and sympathize with each others as equals. However, as complex society emerged, people could no longer relate to each others as equals as hierarchies dissolved the primordial solidarity of the ancestral band.

With the mutation of the first chiefdoms, human societies across the world began an unstoppable evolution towards ever more unequal and ever more kleptocratic societies:

By now, it should be obvious that chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed, nonegalitarian societies. At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes. These noble and selfish functions are inextricably linked, although some governments emphasize much more of than function that of the other. (Diamond 2005: 276)

With civilization, wealth and political power was now inequality distributed across the population, often with a very high correlation between the two. Moreover, that unequal distribution was a feature, not a bug.

After all, any complex system is going to be hierarchical to some degree. As Herbert Simon argued in “The Architecture of Complexity,” hierarchy is to some degree a measurement of complexity. Although Diamond is woefully ignorant about the role that commerce has played in the rise of civilization—a quick perusal through the index of Guns, Germs, and Steel reveals that neither ‘commerce,’ ‘property’ nor ‘trade’ make an appearance there—his broad strokes demonstrate how civilization has become progressively ever less egalitarian. Whatever one may think about Diamond’s larger argument about civilization, his diagnosis of all complex societies as kleptocracies to one degree or another should be heeded. Whether its Babylon, the Egypt of the Middle Kingdom, Antonine Rome, Plantagenet England, or Imperial Germany, few will hold mastery over others. In complex systems, power laws are everywhere and they manifest themselves in civilization.

So the civilization that we live in is deeply kleptocratic, yet it has to be to function. The fact that power laws manifest themselves in civilization isn’t a challenge to reformers; rather, it’s a fact that has to be accepted to live in it. Medieval clerics may have preached that God authorized the kleptocracies around them—and right enough they may have been on that count—but we needn’t have recourse to such rhetoric today, not with our understanding of social evolution. Our civilization, after all, is neither the product of divine command nor a social contract; rather, it has taken the form it has thanks to generations of cultural selection, dependent on a whole menagerie of causes that are historical contingent. Those historical contingencies become crystalized into civilization. To describe the manner in which contingent chance events become integral parts of a functional whole, Stuart A. Kauffman likens the products of evolution to a Rube-Goldberg machine in The Origins of Order:

Beyond the charm of his style, Goldberg’s ad hoc machinery demonstrates a basic principle. Once the components are assembled and once the system works, the system is an integrated whole. Removing or sharply changing any component will probably lead to failure. That is, solutions, once found, are more or less locked in. (Kauffman 1993: 13)

The hierarchies and institutions we have are very much a product of frozen randomness, yet they have become integral to the greater whole of the civilization they are embedded within. To level those hierarchies and institutions in a desire to create a more equal society would be strike at the functional whole that is civilization.

The response to the kleptocracy around us isn’t to return to a simpler society, it’s to reduce the impact of coercion in society and to allow people to carve out their own private spheres of their own making. Abstract rules of conduct, rather than solidarity and encompassing cooperation, are what enable human beings to flourish in a complex society, despite its strongly kleptocratic elements. Commutative justice is foremost among those abstract rules of conduct. Commutative justice enables us to protect ourselves from that kleptocratic world and to follow the path that we desire for ourselves. We have to recognize that virtue begins at home and that our desire to find fulfillment through our wider society is ultimately an impulse that has little role in social existence in a civilization.

03/04/2015

Is there any good news coming from Russia these days? Whether it’s Russia’s involvement, to say the least, in Ukraine or the social slip towards ever greater kleptocracy, every word of news seems to be tinged by suffering as Russia becomes ever more totalitarian. In an interview with Anthony Bourdain, Boris Nemtsov quipped that “Unfortunately, existing power represents Russia of 19th century, not 21st century.” Last Friday, February 27th, Mr. Nemtsov became a victim himself of that existing power when he was gunned down in Moscow, within sight of the Kremlin. In its coverage of Mr. Nemtsov’s death, The Economist christens the man a liberal martyr.

Like all good liberals should be, Mr. Nemtsov was a outspoken critic of corruption and cronyism in his home country. He was Vladimir Putin's gadfly. From his criticism of the Sochi Olympics to his work for fair elections, Mr. Nemtsov had always been one could look to in Russian politics to have some hope for a free Russia. His assassination on Friday is a blow to that hope. Even worse, in a world that sees Russia increasingly taking a belligerent stance towards the outside world, it’s supposed to be.

Those who assassinated Mr. Nemtsov were no amateurs. If they were, they couldn’t be to get away with the deed in sight of the Kremlin. The assassins know that we all know the conclusions that will be extrapolated from the event. To speak of Mr. Nemtsov’s death as a murder would, therefore, be a shameful unwillingness to address the political dimensions that the assassins knew Russians and, perhaps especially the outside world, would take from the event. As Mr. Nemtsov himself remarked in his interview with Anthony Bourdain: “Everybody understands everything in this country.”

Just as Vladimir Putin, and even Boris Yeltsin, inherited the organs of their government from the Soviets, so too did the Soviets from the Tsars. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. However small the machine of terror surrounding Vladimir Putin today may be when compared to either the KGB or Okrana, it’s still there. Assassinated journalists are an all too common event in Russia today. The assassination of Mr. Nemtsov is not much different from the use of terror in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Contrary to what Mr. Nemtsov suggested, the Russia of the 21st century is still frighteningly like the Russia of the 19th century.

The Russian people, just like any other nation, cannot escape their history. As much as Boris Nemtsov is, indeed, a martyr for liberalism, he is on the wrong side of history. Mr. Nemtsov’s liberal optimism that the Russia of the 21st century can be more like the United States of the 21st century than the Russia of the 19thcentury ignores the importance of the evolution of social order in cultivating, and constraining the cultivation of good policies.

In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton offers the question of “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forced destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Hamilton has the ratification of the American Constitution in mind as deciding that question.

Hamilton thought that the establishment of a new United States, one and federal, could prove that human beings weren’t tied to the governments they lived in, that they could come together for a better, brighter alternative. The words are full of the Enlightenment optimism about democracy that, should’ve at least, died a bloody death by Robespierre’s guillotine.The American Revolution itself wasn’t progressive, nor was it even a revolution proper; rather, it was a conservative war of independence.

Russia is another illustration of why Hamilton’s words misrepresent how to get good government. Whatever hope and promise there may have been in the new Russian Federation of liberal reform, by now, are snuffed out. The exact causes of much too complex to explore in a short book, let alone here. Nevertheless, the conclusion that good government can be established “from reflection and choice” has been dashed. Intentions, themselves, aren’t enough. Nor is technical knowledge. To find success, all reforms have to work through history, that is through the complex process of all of human society coevolving with itself across time. Russia shows just how hard it is to establish a liberal society when all one has to go back on is a very, very illiberal history. I cannot escape the conclusion, then, that Mr. Nemtsov's campaign for a liberal Russia is, at the end of the day, tilting at windmills. Russians liberals can respond that they need to be apart of the change if it is to ever occur, but I then wonder where the realistic avenues for liberal change are.

The nations in the former Soviet Union in Eastern Europe often do have a real choice: Look westward of eastward. The mutually exclusive visions for society ultimately represented by Washington DC and Moscow are very real. The Cold War happened for a reason, so did former Soviet Republics asking to join NATO ever since the scarlet banner was brought down from the Kremlin.

Mr. Nemtsov’s death demonstrates that even amidst the institutions of tyranny, people’s desire for liberty still burns ardent. Alas, it also demonstrates that an ardent love of liberty isn’t enough to create liberal governments. Institutions aren’t create by people all pulling at once and choosing at a single moment to create them; rather, institutions grow across history. In formulating reforms, policy-makers have to keep that history in mind. All too often that history excludes the possibility of the desired reforms.

As for Mr. Nemtsov being a liberal martyr. At least in my eyes, the struggle for liberalism in Russia, however Quixotic I may take it to be, seems to be much purer than the struggles for liberalism elsewhere. The reason for that is that Russian liberals actually face Søren Kierkegaard wrote that the truest Christians are those who had to suffer for their beliefs. Without that element of suffering, a Christian, Kierkegaard argued, couldn’t claim to be a true Christian. There is wisdom in that notion. It’s impossible to give a belief lip-service when one might become a target for it. Only those who have had to suffer a worldly cost for their beliefs can really be sure of how valuable those beliefs are.

Liberals in Russia can be sure that liberalism is valuable and that their faith is pure. Liberals elsewhere cannot be so sure, which is troubling since, at its best, liberalism is a fight against the privileges that would lead one to give a political belief lip-service for personal gain.

02/16/2015

Where may the wearied eye reposeWhen gazing on the Great;Where neither guilty glory glows,Nor despicable state?Yes---One---the first---the last---the best---The Cincinnatus of the West,Whom Envy dared not hate,Bequeathed the name of Washington,To make man blush there was but one!

-Lord Byron, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"

Of what Adam Smith said about politicians, the negatives have, for one reason of another, been much more visible than anything he might have said to praise them. Smith’s man of system remarks have become an abused cliché, yet in the paragraphs preceding them in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith discusses another side of the political animal that commentators haven’t nearly been so infatuated with: Public spiritedness. Motivated by a gentle humanity and an understanding of the habits, as well as prejudices, of those he rules, the man of public spirit, though Smith never uses such phrasing, can actually do much good as ruler:

The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear. (TMS: VI..2.41)

Like the man of system remarks, those of the man of public spirit weren’t added until 1790’s sixth edition. One of the thoughts that can immediately come into an American’s mind, considering the time of the changes, was whether Adam Smith thought of any of the Founding Fathers, and George Washington in particular, to be men of public spirit.

Although Smith may not have had Washington in mind when he wrote of the man of public spirit, I would be surprised if Smith did not consider Washington one such animal. Adam Smith, who wrote optimistically of America in The Wealth of Nations, certainly would have known of Washington. Moreover, the act of resigning his commission after peace was secured with Britain in 1783 made Washington a minor celebrity, so Smith certainly would have been reminded of that act whenever he thought of Washington.

Thinking of whether Smith had Washington in mind when writing the passage is a historical curiosity, the recognizing the influence of of men of public spirit is not. Institutions matter, yes. And institutions should be what we talk about most when we talk about political systems. Yet when thinking about politics, we cannot forget that actual human beings occupy the roles that we ponder about and that they bring their own unique personalities along with them. The thought that Washington resigning his commission or retiring for the presidency is a minor event in American history, even though those events were based on Washington’s personality rather than institutional (or even cultural constraints), is quickly alleviated by remembering what happened within two decades when a Francophone general returned from a campaign with a hero’s welcome.

A bit of a postscript: A shared similarity between the two, albeit a similarity between many, many thinkers at the time, is that there were both concerned with the adverse effects of faction. In Chapter 2 of Part IV of The Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith would lambast faction as being informed by “the spirit of system” and motivated by “the madness of fanaticism”:

Amidst the turbulence and disorder of faction, a certain spirit of system is apt to mix itself with that public spirit which is founded upon the love of humanity, upon a real fellowWashington and the Man of Public Spirit-feeling with the inconveniencies and distresses to which some of our fellow-citizens may be exposed. This spirit of system commonly takes the direction of that more gentle public spirit; always animates it, and often inflames it even to the madness of fanaticism. The leaders of the discontented party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation which, they pretend, will not only remove the inconveniencies and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniencies and distresses. They often propose, upon this account, to new-model the constitution, and to alter, in some of its most essential parts, that system of government under which the subjects of a great empire have enjoyed, perhaps, peace, security, and even glory, during the course of several centuries together. The great body of the party are commonly intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colours in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it. Those leaders themselves, though they originally may have meant nothing but their own aggrandisement, become many of them in time the dupes of their own sophistry, and are as eager for this great reformation as the weakest and foolishest of their followers. Even though the leaders should have preserved their own heads, as indeed they commonly do, free from this fanaticism, yet they dare not always disappoint the expectation of their followers; but are often obliged, though contrary to their principle and their conscience, to act as if they were under the common delusion. The violence of the party, refusing all palliatives, all temperaments, all reasonable accommodations, by requiring too much frequently obtains nothing; and those inconveniencies and distresses which, with a little moderation, might in a great measure have been removed and relieved, are left altogether without the hope of a remedy. (TMS: VI.2.40)

Washington likewise argued against the influence of factions in his 1796 Farewell Address, though, unlike Smith, Washington classified all factions as being motivated by the spirit of party:

All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

01/20/2015

On this day in 1265, Simon de Montfort summoned the first Parliament to Westminster Palace. After seizing power after defeating the Plantagenet King Henry III, who still remained king but who had to surrender his son Edward as a hostage, de Montfort was loosing his grip on power. His mandate to power was defeating a great noble in power and his allies were drifting away, concerned with both de Montfort’s treatment of Henry as well as his use of foreign knights. Whatever one’s opinions about monarchs, it’s a curious historical accident that Simon de Montfort, who certainly ruled no less autocratically as the worst Plantagenet kings in his short reign as quasi-king, would come to be known as a progenitor of democracy.

And that brings me to the main topic of the day: In “One Cheer for Democracy”, the Adam Smith Institute’s Eamonn Butler provides us with a classical-liberal meditation for the day:

Today (20 January) is hailed in the UK as Democracy Day – the 750th anniversary of the establishment of the first parliament of elected representatives in Westminster. Let’s not get too dewy-eyed. We classical liberals are democrats, but we are sceptical democrats. Yes, some (minimal) functions require collective action. We think that the public, not elites, should make those decisions – and that representative government is probably the best way to do it.

But we are fully aware hat the democratic process is far from perfect. It is not about reconciling different interests (as markets do), but about choosing between conflicting interests – a battle in which only one side can win. Democracy is tainted by the self-interest of electors, of representatives and of officials; it can produce deeply irrational results; and all too often it leads to minority groups being exploited, and their liberties curbed, all in the name of ‘democracy’.

Any democracy worth praising wouldn’t take de Montfort as its ancestor. Simon de Montfort was a warlord who gained immense power by surreptitiously marrying the king’s youngest sister, whose aggressive campaigns in in Gascon saw him being summoned back to England to face a trial and who continued to advocate war in France even while all hope for holding the old Angevin realms died out. Although it is certainly romantic to think of a figure waging war against the king for the rule of law and for democracy, to think of de Montfort motivated principally by those concerns would be fantasy.

William Gladstone, that great liberal statesman, repeatedly proclaimed that he would support the masses over the classes. At its root, praiseworthy democracy is an outcome of our bourgeois era. With the great enrichment of the masses has come their demand that they have a voice in politics. While I’m certainly skeptical of representative government, I’m not skeptical of economic prosperity and one does lead to another. We’ve just got to be careful, on this Democracy Day (let’s just assume we’re all British for the day), that we’re careful to identify the way the arrow of causation goes.

So, one cheer for representative government. Three cheers for prosperity!

12/20/2014

Detroit is a monument to the fact that prosperity need not last forever. By assuming that progress is a brute fact of nature and that the opulence shall last forever, one flirts with disaster. Detroit did just that. Whereas Detroit was merely half a century ago one of the entire world's most prosperous cities, today it has a fate much like that of Prypiat. The Daily Mail's article, "The tiny urban island of downtown Detroit, lost in the wide open spaces of a depopulated city", is testament to that. The death of Detroit is all too evident from the air: